Howling Stones.

[Bboboo]

Figured out how to import EQ zones into Blender the other day. I'm thinking of starting a side project where I connect all the zones together and maybe try importing it all to unreal with a controller. For some reason the only way I could get textures to load was under render mode, if anyone has any experience with blender and importing textures send me a PM or reply here.

http://i.imgur.com/jaPrf07.jpg

[Sorn]

For some reason the only way I could get textures to load was under render mode, if anyone has any experience with blender and importing textures send me a PM or reply here.

Hey! Not sure how much you know about 3D programs in general but usually only render mode will display full textures. For modeling purposes you get a much less detailed version of the textures/materials so it doesn't tax your computer more than necessary.

That said, check this out! It should answer your question: http://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/5283/how-to-show-textures-in-editor

It would be fun if you could print all the zones out in 3D and connect the zones together physically, too. :) But that would take a lot of printing.

[iruinedyourday]

You're one of the forum people that age like a fine wine.

[captnamazing]

Very cool!

[Bboboo]

Hey! Not sure how much you know about 3D programs in general but usually only render mode will display full textures. For modeling purposes you get a much less detailed version of the textures/materials so it doesn't tax your computer more than necessary.

That said, check this out! It should answer your question: http://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/5283/how-to-show-textures-in-editor

It would be fun if you could print all the zones out in 3D and connect the zones together physically, too. :) But that would take a lot of printing.

Hey thanks for the link. I picked up blender about 8 months ago and self taught myself a bunch of it, however I haven't used it in a while so a lot is kinda fuzzy.

What was weird is that Blender recognizes the images under Rendered mode (http://i.imgur.com/gJJvyRM.gif) but does not display them under Material (http://i.imgur.com/9BRCg1M.gif) and Texture (http://i.imgur.com/wESILjJ.gif) mode, those two modes are easier to work in than rendered mode as you stated. I selected one object that should just be grass and tried to UV unwrap it and assign the texture to it but still didn't display any texture. Also you can see that some of the textures are mapped wrong and are flipped around. (http://i.imgur.com/n3JLtku.gif)

I think it's the way I'm trying to get these files into blender though. I am just taking the .s3d files from my EQ folder and using a program I got from Google (EQG Zone Importer to convert) them into a .obj files so it can be imported to blender.

I will continue to mess around and relearn what I have forgotten. Above is just a quick example of what's going on, I can be more detailed if needed. Three things are kinda holding me up from recreating EQ, one of which is the texture issue above. The other is getting the in zone objects like, houses, druid rings, tress, ect... in. The final bit being that the zone walls are in (walls that prevent you from getting out of the zone) and they show as being solid walls in blender so they will have to be removed or a transparency affect/texture/material would need to be added.

[Sorn]

I tried looking up that converter and found mention of it being a little buggy, so that's probably the origin of your issues. There seems to be another one out there but I don't know how well that would work.

For the textures, if the unmap doesn't work, you may have to go in and change some settings for the UV mapping itself. Worst case scenario is probably going in and rebuilding the UV map by hand using (I think) the UV/Image Editor. UV map coordinates should be set to UV rather than generated.

I'm wondering if there are multiple materials applied to the original zone and that's why they're stuttering after being converted. The trails and the edge of the sand seem to be in approximately the right places when they show up, they're just flipped or copying incorrectly.

[Pringles]

Lets see some Seb!

[Zaela]

EQG Zone Importer

Hey, I remember making that tool. Feels like a long time ago... probably only a year or two, though.

The .obj export was definitely something I just slapped together and never scrutinized the output of. UVs might be backwards because I would have been looking at later versions of the zonefiles which use DDS textures -- DDS textures are stored backwards. I probably assumed they would always be DDS and flipped them around to export as PNG or whatever I ended up doing. Older versions of the zonefiles (as gotten from the Titanium install) use BMP textures rather than DDS, so they may be getting flipped when they shouldn't be. Or I might have flipped around the UVs themselves. Dunno.

Adding zone objects and excluding zone walls would be easy to do if I were motivated to do some work (probably make a new tool from scratch, my older stuff is pretty crap).


I still hope to see the day when someone uses some of my tools to add ramps between the islands in PoSky or something. The most unorthodox hack the server can't detect! (Until someone just, you know, sees you constantly falling while walking on air.)

[Zaela]

I was bored and had a half-made zone viewer thingy that was easy enough to adapt for .obj exporting.

Link (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/70648819/downloads/S3D%20Zone%20Exporter.zip)

It's not complete but might tide you over for now. The biggest discrepancy is that some zones with animated objects -- chiefly swaying trees in Kunark and Velious zones -- are currently rendered in the "jumble of nonsense" positions that they are defined in rather than what they would look like on the first frame of their animation. I'll have to look at that later -- had some success with mob animations a month or two ago, hoping that animated objects will be pretty much the same.

There are some one-off oddities too, some of them possibly things that have hardcoded fixes in the client and so would also need hardcoded fixes in a viewer. For example, some bits of things in fearplane are just... not there. Specifically the mid-sections of the pillars inside the ring of fire, there's just empty space where there should clearly be something. Never taken a super close look at that but that has stood out to me for a long while. There are also some one-off textures that are not flagged correctly to have parts masked off: have fixes for this for trees in kithikor and in highpass, there's probably others out there that'll need it.

There are also some things that EQ does that might not be expressible in .obj format. The main thing I'm thinking of is that there are a lot of places where EQ uses additive color for cheap partial transparency (pixels are opaque as they approach white, transparent as they approach black -- normally used for particles and things like that), like for semi-transparent water surfaces, rays of light coming out of skulls that decorate some zones like befallen, neon thingies in Neriak, etc. Seems like .obj expects more standard stuff like alpha transparency, which EQ does use, but not as much.

http://i.imgur.com/iRwCwd2.png

http://i.imgur.com/04ilikd.png


Also, I had to disable shading in Blender to see everything nice and textured. Hit N to bring up the side menu > Shading > check "Shadeless". Also helped to increase the clipping distance in the same menu under View > Clip > End; 10000.00 is a nice number there. I still have no idea how to navigate a huge model nicely in Blender, though...

Edit: import the .obj files with -Z as FORWARD, -Y as UP.

[Bboboo]

Holy shit Zaela, you just made this 100 times easier, thank you! This program is really easy to use and export the zones into object files. They also come in as one object instead of every plane being an object as the previous program would do. I quickly went ahead and recreated Faydwer as accurate as I could. Some zones overlap though, so you kinda have to take some liberties as how the zones connect.



Here is an overview of Faydwer without textures, Steamfont is the lower right and OOT in the back.
http://i.imgur.com/8hSafPz.jpg



With the textures turned on.
http://i.imgur.com/jVcfNxC.jpg



Felwithe
http://i.imgur.com/WaiyRh1.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/tHiBl20.jpg



Kelethin and the Wizard Spires.
http://i.imgur.com/duY9VAX.jpg



Crushbone
http://i.imgur.com/4GABBFt.jpg




Probably the coolest is Kaladim
http://i.imgur.com/zCsbRgy.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/g61OIrp.jpg



The bottom left of Lesser Faydark overlaps ontop Dagnor's Cauldron, also if you take the zone connections literally, Mistmoore intersects with Lfay
http://i.imgur.com/ScugUF0.jpg



I dragged Mistmoore out some, it would be above Dagnor's if you followed the zone line straight.
http://i.imgur.com/PxbrRy3.jpg

[Bboboo]

Kedge Keep
http://i.imgur.com/ns8fCbR.jpg



Again if you took the zone connections literally unrest would be inside Dagnor's Cauldron, I left it outside though.
http://i.imgur.com/FctyqFZ.jpg



Akanon is below Steamfont
http://i.imgur.com/X5j2qYR.jpg



I'm not 100% sure if I have OOT in the right orientation, the AC camp is closer to BB right?
http://i.imgur.com/ltkbmOx.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/jGGMfOG.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/S4w6W5I.jpg

[Bboboo]

Lets see some Seb!

http://i.imgur.com/GET2bOP.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/yYTlsrY.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/OC0xEEg.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/ZtPhl6R.jpg


I still hope to see the day when someone uses some of my tools to add ramps between the islands in PoSky or something. The most unorthodox hack the server can't detect! (Until someone just, you know, sees you constantly falling while walking on air.)

Inc super shitty ramps.
http://i.imgur.com/WvkRf6t.jpg




Also reason for multiple posts is because you can only have 10 images per post.

[Sorn]

Nice!

[beyondinfin]

OMG! More please! I love it.

[Zaela]

Inc super shitty ramps.

Haha, just as I imagined it!

Not surprising that some zones overlap or don't line up nicely with their connecting zonelines... I have a feeling Antonica will be bad about that in some places. Might want to consider there being some implied distance between the zone-out from zone A and the connecting zone-in in zone B in some cases.

Also not too much crap floating out of bounds in Faydwer zones. Antonica's worse about that as well -- gukbottom especially has a bunch of random bits and pieces floating around in the middle of nowhere, including at least one entire free-floating room with a doorway leading to nothingness. Not to mention cat boxes. (Oh, reminds me of befallen -- the other end of befallen's zoneline is a catbox. Not gonna line up nicely no matter how you look at it ;p)

[Bboboo]

OMG! More please! I love it.

Freeport
http://i.imgur.com/lK1B0XV.jpg

Also not too much crap floating out of bounds in Faydwer zones. Antonica's worse about that as well

I've just been deleting the extra bits.

[Bboboo]

http://i.imgur.com/AiGj2rD.jpg

[dafier]

Bboboo. I just want to say that this is really cool. Thanks for your time and efforts.

Cheers,

[Zaral]

Awesome stuff, loving these.

Thanks!

[Lamil]

good stuff!

[blondeattk]

interesting gap between SK and the lake. is rathe mountains the right scale?

[Pringles]

doing gods work! Thanks for the seb pic

[Bboboo]

Yes everything should be at the correct scale (or most of the zone lines wouldn't match up).

It's interesting how some zones have quite a bit of the connecting zone attached to it, like Nek/Lava for example. They obviously put some of the connecting zone there to give the illusion that the zones are connected when zoning, but some of it seems unnecessary.


Lavastorm/Nektulos
http://i.imgur.com/v093EXk.jpg

Lavastorm Selected
http://i.imgur.com/hGhxhge.jpg

Lavastorm moved up on the Z Axis
http://i.imgur.com/y9eoPSR.jpg



Also if I was to scale Rathe Mountains up you can see that the zone lines are out of scale.
http://i.imgur.com/jR37Sy6.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/IIMMOVh.jpg

You could scale the other zones but you would mostly just come back to where you started but with everything just bigger.

[kledar]

Guk?

[Gustoo]

so gooood

[am0n]

I'd love to see a server without zones (or, at least less).... Be funny watching people run for half an hour to avoid a train. =P

[Zaela]

Was looking into something briefly and realized the tool I slapped together has the winding order backwards for what Blender expects. Made a minor update (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/70648819/downloads/S3D%20Zone%20Exporter.zip) to the export tool in case there is any desire to do the below.

In Blender there's a checkbox for backface culling under the "shadeless" option -- allows seeing the interiors of rooms in dungeons and such. Quick look at sleeper like that, with the final room prominent:

http://i.imgur.com/Czp7bhD.png

And just for fun, the same view with orthographic projection (no perspective, like an old isometric game) which can be toggled with numpad 5 or View > View Persp/Ortho from the lower menu bar.

http://i.imgur.com/8HiWmmL.png

[Zaela]

Sebilis too, why not. I think the previous look at it had one of the axes flipped.

http://i.imgur.com/MsBKcbP.png


http://i.imgur.com/W6m3WdT.png

[Zaela]

Guk?

Bit of a jumble when viewed as a single unit. The zonelines line up quite nicely, though.

http://i.imgur.com/jI0jbvi.png

Here's the same view with Upper Guk highlighted. Interestingly, when viewed individually the guks seem to have a lot of random crap floating around in the middle of nowhere, but it turns out that most of those are actually leftover parts of the other Guk. If you look closely here you can see lots of random bits of Lower Guk highlighted, particularly in the upper part of the image right-of-center, and to the lower left of the Upper Guk entrance (where the red, green and blue arrows thingy is).

http://i.imgur.com/gXhMHGL.png

And an othrographic look at the same view which makes them even more prominent (along with the fact that I wasn't patient enough to line up the zonelines perfectly).

http://i.imgur.com/EJ7m6u2.png


Random shot of the lower-ness of Lower Guk (highlighted).

http://i.imgur.com/xCIZwAK.png


It seems pretty certain that the Guks were originally modelled as one unit, then split apart at some point when they were too lazy to clean up all the separated bits and pieces. There is one exception, though: where Upper Guk has its entrance room, Lower Guk puts a GM room centered on 0, 0, 0 (precisely where the 3D arrows are centered).

Upper
http://i.imgur.com/GQR5lAv.png

Lower
http://i.imgur.com/hMKKj9V.png


Too lazy to get a shot that gives a better look of Lower Guk. Seems making the whole Upper Guk model semi-transparent would be complicated in Blender.